The first entry in this new anthology begins with the blackened image of a watch, its hands stalled at 11:02 a.m., the precise moment of atomic implosion in Nagasaki. It is an instant so monumental, we imagine it could stall time itself. It is like the moment a tumor bursts, or a city goes dead. The traumatized timepiece foreshadows many of the themes in this collection: the rupturing of the temporal, the troubled legacy of history.
In "The Diary of Noboru Tokuda," the World War II navy guard finds himself forced not into warfare, but subsistence farming on a Pacific island. With time on his hands, he is able to create a sketchbook of his experiences. In captions accompanying the drawings, preoccupations with war and death turn to concerns over crop cultivation. A war diary gradually becomes a horticultural calendar and seed catalogue, as the writer notes the comparative merits of growing mangosteens, salaks, soursops and South Sea Apples. Blessed with a war that left him unscathed, he lived to the ripe old age of ninety-seven.
The protagonists of Kentaro Yamaki's short story "Last Time I Saw You," are less fortunate. Embroiled in fierce combat in New Guinea, the narrator describes how, as defeat stares them in the face, resentment grows at "the deadly stupid pride among us Japanese agitated by fabricated, state-backed Shinto mythology."